Hay Day is one of the most popular free to play games on the App Store, but it'll cost you a bundle in in app purchases if you're not careful. Here are some tips I've figured out on how to get ahead in the game without paying a dime.

Hay Day puts you in charge of rehabilitating a farm that's seen better days. You grow and harvest crops, raise livestock, clearing land, and make goods you can sell to local businesses and consumers to make a tidy profit. With each new level comes new goods you can make, new livestock and crops, and some other assorted goodies to help make your farming experience better. Like most free to play games, there's an in app purchase mechanism that you can use to buy a hard currency in the game (diamonds) which will get you ahead and get you out of jams. The tips I've come up with are to keep you out of those jams.

1. Don't run out of seed crops

Every crop you plant will double its yield upon harvest — one unit of corn planted in your field yields two corn units in your silo. As tempted as you may be to use up all the seeds in your silo to fill a lucrative order, don't. Plant those seeds and make sure to keep enough on hand to create the products you're going to need later. If you do, you'll have no choice but to use diamonds to buy more seeds.

Especially as your farm grows, you're going to need to constantly supply your livestock with feed — to that end, you should always have a good stock of wheat, corn, soybeans and other feed in your silo at all times.

2. Plant slow-growing crops at night or during work hours

Some crops only take a few minutes to pop up — wheat, corn, and carrots, for example, all take less than ten minutes. Others, like pumpkins and indigo, take hours. Make sure to plant those crops before you go to sleep or if you're going to busy with work or school for a few hours; that way they'll be ready when you get back and you can harvest and use them as you need to.

The same rule applies to livestock and to finished goods you're making. Some take hours to get ready, so make sure they start production before you're off to bed, and they'll be ready when you wake up the next day.

3. Don't bother with visitors to your farm

Visitors to your farm want to buy your goods, but they typically don't want to pay a premium for them. So don't be afraid to say no. They won't take offense and they'll come around again soon enough as soon as the mood strikes them.

About the only exception I make is when I have a total glut on something, like chicken eggs, or something I can make really fast, like wheat.

This brings me to my next tip...

4. Use your roadside stand to fill your coffers

Rather than selling goods to visitors, sell them to your friends and followers who are also playing Hay Day. You can check your newspaper to see what your friends are selling products for and follow suit. What I usually do is just max out the price of the good then knock 10 percent off. Usually it sells right away.

5. Don't be afraid to say no to orders

Your bulletin board will pile up with orders from nearby businesses that need your goods — stores, salons, schools, churches and more. They're usually willing to pay a fair price, but sometimes you don't have enough goods to fill the orders, or it'll take too long, or you may not even have the equipment or livestock to fill the order. Don't be afraid to dump the order in the trash.

You'll end up waiting a few minutes until the next order arrives, but if you can fill it, it'll be more worthwhile than having the limited space you have for orders taken up by stuff you can't or don't want to fill.

6. Balance money with experience

As your orders come in, you'll see two figures appear at the bottom — coins and stars. Coins are the money you'll get for each order, and stars are the experience points you'll get for completing that order.

Succeeding at Hay Day is as much about leveling up as it is about making coins, so look at those orders carefully. It may be worth your while to go with an order that offers less cash but more experience to help you level up faster.

7. And a cheat - reload the game to refresh the newspaper

I've already given you six tips and tricks, but I promised you a cheat too, so here you go: Your newspaper shows you the current deals that other Hay Day players are offering. You can force the newspaper to refresh if you quit the game entirely, then relaunch it. (And when I say quit the game, I mean get it out of active memory - if you're unfamiliar with how to do so, follow these instructions.) The newspaper should be refreshed and you'll see new deals.

8. Your top tips, tricks, and cheats?

So there you go — six quick tips for getting the most out of Hay Day. Do you have others? Are you frustrated with Hay Day? Or has it already cost you a bundle in in app purchases? Sound off in the comments and let me know what you think. And if you haven't already tried Hay Day, make sure to check it out in the App Store.

Rely heavily upon your newspaper. Try not to buy goods that you can easily produce yourself. Look for the yellow tags in ads in the newspaper, go to these farms quickly and look for trees and bushes to water (for extra experience). Always look for your "red tool box" in the farms you visit, click them to try for free items. If they want you to pay 3 diamonds, do not do it. Click outside of the dialogue box, do not close the box dialogue via the "X" button.

More: I will however, damn near spend myself into debt amassing building materials for the silo and barn, and also acquiring land expansion materials. I will try to get a surplus of these materials. Again, I do this via the newspaper. I'll take comments if you think this is a wise course of action or not.

If anyone needs building materials or land expansion items you can go the Hayday forums on the supercell website. There's a couple of trading threads that people use to trade for what ever items you may need. I did this when I wanted to finish expanding my farm and fishing area. I was able to completely expand everything in 3 or 4 days doing this.

worst review ever.
- first off if you want to make cash you need to do the wheating, aka planting wheat and selling at 1 to get more land expansion mats, barn and silo mats.
- start expanding your silo as much as you can (cap is 10k spaces), buy wheat at 1 coin from other people in the newspaper if necessary, fill the silo with wheat and nothing else, and visitors (npcs) will only ask for wheat, which is where the money comes from. you will reach a point where you won't need to plant wheat anymore, just buy it off other players and fill up the silo to cash in.
- furthermore, you do know you have infinite newspaper available right? all you need to do is change your language and you'll get a brand new newspaper to browse for items (mostly lem, sem, bem=land materials, silo materials, barn materials).
- if this isn't enough you can go to a neighbor or friend farm (the trick won't work in your farm) and open the mistery boxes. you can open all of them, just tap the box, don't use the X to close the popup, just tap outside it, click on your friend's icon in the friend bar to reload the farm, look for the box again (it will be in a different place, sometimes hidden behind a tree or the house), repeat even 30 times if necessary, you'll get your item out of it.
- not enough yet? save up to 90 diamonds with achievements, when the offer for Tom pops up hire him for 10 days for 90 diamonds. all you have to do is buying shovels every 2 hours and use them in the mine to get more diamonds. at the end of the 10 days you'll have another 90+ extra. sell or process all the metals coming out of the mine, never stockpile them.
- don't bother with white orders on your board unless they ask for wheat or other easy cheap crops.only do the blue ones for vouchers
- fish a lot, either fish or lobsters, sell what you get. don't hoard anything but wheat.
there are many more tricks, just youtube them, there's a video for everything, but DON'T FOLLOW THE POST ABOVE, unless you wanna be a loser at this game that is.
cheers

One more thing is to maintain your Roadside shop properly. It may seem unimportant, but personally, my biggest source of inform is my Roadside shop. Also, don't post ads for every single thing you have, simply post for the cheapest item, and no matter how unreasonable the other ones are, they often get sold.

I agree with Elena Callegari! Alternative tip is to grow only crop of high value (when you are busy and don´t check in hay day so often) keep selling them and buy wheat etc from the newspaper or friends. Often 10 for 1 money and other good deals.
Hay Day is fun!